By Dick Stark

Atlassian held its annual world wide conference last week in San Jose with RightStar there in full force.  It was a very good show with more than 3000 attendees. We also received a large number of new leads for our just announced ScanStar barcode scanning for Jira/Insight which is now completing beta.

The Summit is an annual event where Atlassian shares its plans with its partners and customers. There are tracks for training, new product announcements and updates. It is an opportunity for customers to come and meet partners and Atlassian employees to exchange ideas and collaborate. Atlassian is growing with $630M in annual revenue, and more than 90,000 unique customers.

What’s New? The two big announcements this year—Stride and Trello. Stride is “HipChat on Steroids,” and according to Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brooks is a “Slack Killer.” Slack, the productivity and chat tool is one of the hottest products on the market for tech workers. It’s a mainstream tool among tech companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, and eBay. Atlassian has been using Stride as their sole communication tool internally for several months. The Stride early access program is available now, with full rollout in 2018.

In early 2017, Trello was acquired by Atlassian. Like, Jira, Trello is a productivity platform for developers, or anyone who wants to work collaboratively and get more done. Mike Cannon-Brookes commented, “Trello is a more dynamic way to drive discussions, track follow-ups, and manage work at home or in the office.” And the best news, Trello is free to organizations of under 100.

ShipIt. Atlassian held a 48 hour ShipIt day among five employee development teams during the conference. Updates were reported constantly. ShipIt, also known as a hackathon, stems from Atlassian’s strong belief in teamwork (not the idea of the lone genius). ShipIt consists of planning—plan dates, announce and tell stories, find your teams aka pitch it; event—remember time is ticking, have fun, get energized—eat and drink; and presentations—give it all you got, voting, celebrations, winners announced, get onto a product roadmap and plan for the next ShipIt. ShipIt is not necessarily just for IT projects. Legend has it that Jira Service Desk was born from a ShipIt team consisting of Atlassian co-founders Scott and Mike.

The winning ShipIt team actually developed a full meeting voice recorder in Stride, so that no one need worry about ever missing a meeting again! We remain excited about the Atlassian potential ahead and look forward to an even better 2018!